Can you see the crop mode being useful for anything? Personally, i can't, purely a tease for a 1080p crop mode, which would be more useful.

However it'd be interesting to confirm that it doesn't exhibit moire artefacts as well as seeing how the 550D performs in general with these issues. Perhaps they have a different OLPF which helps a bit or perhaps there are some other subtle changes. I suspect it would be exactly the same as the 7D though...

Hi Paul, the aliasing & moiré seems to be there, especially in the water reflections on the pavement. The diagrams of the CMOS unit shows a single lowpass filter but that would need confirmation.

As for the usefulness of the crop mode, apart from a mock '24' look, getting 6 crops on one 1080 frame, I suppose maybe the odd inset layer on video, product demonstration/tutorial. I don't think much of the press pack would carry one for just this feature but at $800 and the small size you could pop it in a big pocket.

I'm doing some daylight tests now.

James

Last edited by James Miller; February 25th, 2010 at 06:35 AM.
Reason: spelling

That's really useful, 0246 shows everything that's wrong with these cameras which is such a shame! Purple and teal moire over the slate roof and brickwork. Shimmering lines at the top of the van and the moving car. It's shocking! I think when we look at stills we forget that it's the movement that really shows everything.

Having said that i may upgrade my old canon anyway, i can justify it for the stills alone and perhaps there are a few B shots these can be used with.

And i suppose there is a temptation to see if the OLPF can be replaced with something just for video (and obviously ruin the stills side at the same time). But it's way cheaper than a 7D!

I pushed that clip with in camera sharpening two clicks right past centre to bring out the aliasing.

My other DSLR is the 5DMK2, the images out of the 550D play better, possibly due to the frame rates and just feels smoother than the 5DMK2. But the aliasing is still the problem, and in 1280 its terrible and you even see it on the crop mode when you look for it.

With careful shots this camera is great, but the 5DMK2 is my favorite. When the frame rate firmware update is released it will fantastic.

As for the lowpass filter, I have been down this road and had made a additional filter for the 5DMK2. But to fight against the line skipping, or what ever process is used to down scale the video, you have to use a very heavy LP filter that cuts all the detail out of the picture, even then the aliasing is still there, just masked a little.

What they need is a sensor with bigger pixels and no or little micro gap between them, trade off would be a very low res pixel camera.

Okay about the sharpening. As you say the real underlying issue is the effective gaps between the pixels unless there is a really heavy LP on it (hence the caprock stuff). So in reality it is unlikely to be solved with new LP and be satisfactory.

It will be curious to see what Canon does with regard to video, afterall they could easily make a 1080p sensor in APS-C but i must assume the unit sales aren't worth it (compared to stills). So instead, perhaps we must wait for fast enough hardware to downsample the entire frame and have a single APS C sensor with dual functionality - stills for the volume and video as an aside.

I think it would be technically possible to minimise some of the effects in post, reduce the colouration and perhaps use scaling technology to smooth off stairstepped lines. It's worth a shot...

If they had the internal power to process the raw data it would be great, but that would mean new hardware and expense, something not possible at the moment with these duel format cameras at that price point.

Can you see the crop mode being useful for anything? Personally, i can't, purely a tease for a 1080p crop mode, which would be more useful.l

I see it as a tease for RAW video. If the 550D can output an SD crop, I'm betting the 5D Mark III will be able to do 1080 crop. Give Canon another 12-18 months and the 5DIV or 7DII will do RAW. Just speculation on my part, but I think it's reasonable to anticipate this.

If the future 5D or 7D support SDXC, who knows, maybe transfer and storage won't be such a problem.